On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 23:53 +0000, Chris Wilson wrote:
> Thomas Lord [mailto:lord@emf.net] wrote:
> >I said that web interop using
> >TTF/OTF would create a market for entrants who
> >use more permissive licenses.
> How about we create a market that encourages entrants, whether they want their TTFs copied or not?
Please elaborate.
Suppose that I am a potential market entrant
in waiting. I am willing to try to make a go
of things in the market if I can offer my libre
fonts in TTF or some OTF extension. That way,
if someone spots a copy of my font on the web
they can download it and use it with all of their
other apps without any hassle of conversion and
so forth. I'll make my $ on bespoke font design
work, on first-sales of copies, and so forth.
I won't command the royalties to which restricted-license
vendors are accustomed but if I'm good at this I
might well get a premium on my labor hours and
bandwidth. The enabling element is a Recommended
requirement and IE adoption of TTF/OTF as a web
font format.
You want to open the door to entrants not interested
in TTF/OTF compatibility. It has been repeatedly
proposed to add a novel format which, at least as a
side effect, supports that as well. You, so far,
said "No." but then you seemed to soften that in
later messages.
So, where do you stand?
-t